Experimental Test and Analysis of "Soft-landing" Control for Drop-induced Shock Systems using Magnetorheological Energy Absorber

Aiming at realizing a "soft landing", i.e., the final velocity of the payload exactly reduces to 0 when consuming the total piston stroke of magnetorheological energy absorber(MREA), a control algorithm for the single-degree-of-freedom shock mitigation system based on MREA under drop-induced shock excitation is investigated in this paper. The dynamic model and the experimental setup of the single-degree-of-freedom shock mitigation system are established. A feedforward damping force tracking scheme based on a basic resistor-capacitor(RC) operator-based hysteresis model is presented and is employed to accurately describe and predict the hysteretic nonlinearity of MREA. According to the real-time states of the dropped mass, the system controller calculates and outputs the appropriate damping force of MREA to achieve the desired minimized deceleration of the payload. The feasibility and the capability of the designed control algorithm for the shock mitigation system based on MREA with precise hysteresis model are